Transparency - the curse of knowing

If we were to list the public morals of the Western world in the 21st century, in any top 5 list the word "transparency" would have to come up. It is usually paired with "accountability". This loving couple brings to us the message that

"everything about you should be known to anyone that wants to know and you should be able to answer, to that anyone's satisfaction, any question about your actions with a reasonable and rational response".

"anyone that wants to know" is often rephrased as "stakeholders". I often think it's worth remembering that Dracula had stake holders too and they didn't do him all that much good.

Is transparency truly a good idea?

I have a packet of chips next to me. I know they're not healthy. Pure fat and salt wrapped around a piece of potato of sub-atomic thickness. Do I really need to know that in every 50g serve there is 150% of my lifetime's allowance of sodium and enough fat to keep most of the population of the Horn of Africa alive for a month? No. Honestly, I don't want to know. It's not going to change my behaviour - I'm still going to eat the things.

I saw an autopsy once. All those squidgy bits packed so tightly in together. It's not pretty. If you've ever witnessed one it should be enough to convince you that seeing what goes on inside a person is not a good thing. Admire his well chiselled features, his high, academic forehead, and his manly biceps. You don't want to see how any of that is made, trust me. Anything south of the mouth and north of the .. and so forth, is best left to the surgeons. Opacity is our good friend in this case. I suspect that the darkness behind the eyes is also best left un-illuminated. Messrs Escher and Burton have nothing on my brain. And I don't think I'm unique. Men walking up inverted staircases and hands that draw each other are dealt with before breakfast. From then on it gets seriously weird. You really want this to be transparent? If you ask why I did something, do you truly think the answer will make sense? I'll tell you something I think you want to hear but I could be doing it because the little puppet figure with the big head fell off the self-sustaining waterfall and wound up stuck in a room full of prime numbers with a bad base of acalculia. For your sake and that of your loved ones, just take my explanations at face value and don't worry about where they came from.

Sometimes I think real business is like that too. I watch the latest scandal involving quasi-government Australian companies selling wheat to dodgy dictators or going through a suspicious amount of petty cash and brown paper bags and I wonder why I needed to know. Our guys are making a profit. Their guys are eating. Provided we're not burning children or funding another bloody zombie apocalypse movie or committing other crimes against humanity, did I need to look through that particular window? A discrete drawing of the blinds might have been better. The world isn't full of nice people and we have to do business with the world. Far better not to know what we had to wash off our hands afterwards.

If you're spending my money or pouring luminescent putrescence into my waterways as you produce your thneeds then I need to know what you're doing and why - here are my fifteen cents and a nail - but sometimes I think that we, as human beings, need to realise that there is a sane, rational and reasonable world that we need to pretend that we live in and then there's the darkness of real existence - chaotic, unpredictable, random, and existing in fractional dimensions. To take the wrong pill and wake up outside our comfortable Matrix might not be such a good idea - there be dragons.

Making your childhood dreams come true

I am very disappointed. A lifetime of twee kids movies and self-help books had led me to believe that, if I worked hard enough and truly, really-truly, believed with all my heart, that my childhood dreams would come true. I too could get an all-smiles freeze frame shot with my whole family and a jaunty little tune over the credits.

And have they come true? Have they what?

I have tried for years, man and boy, to make the swing go all the way over. It was the classic boyhood dream that one day I'd be strong enough to lean back super-hard on those chains and make the swing go so fast that it would loop right up and over and I would come screaming down the other side - the envy of all I surveyed. And it hasn't happened. No matter how big and tall I've become, how many of my greens I've eaten, it just won't work. I get to almost horizontal, the chain goes slack and my dreams sag with it.

And while we're talking about flying, I've never managed to get into space. My homemade rocket boosters - thoughtfully built using recycled materials such as toilet rolls and cotton wool with a touch of metho - did nothing. Not even so much as a creditable disaster on the launch pad. Absolutely nothing. So I upgraded the tube to empty paint cans, nailed onto the back of the cubby. Orbit? No. On reflection, it may be as well that this particular dream didn't work because my life-support system consisted mainly of a purloined length of garden hose but the principle remains! It was my childhood dream. And it hasn't come true. Even as a grown-up, I can't get the damn cubby-house off the ground.

Nor the car. Sitting in the middle of the back seat as a kid, I knew I was on a runway. The night was dark, the headlights illuminated the morse-code lines down the middle of the road and the runway edges were marked in flashing red and white. If dad would only pull back hard enough on that steering wheel we were absolutely going to fly all the way home. The only reason it didn't work was that dad just wasn't trying hard enough. Or so I thought. I am the dad now and, try as I might, I just can't get the DeLorean effect. Another one bites the dust.

2015 is next year, by the way. The bloody car companies have some serious R&D to get done.

If I couldn't get to the sky, the next dream involved getting the sky to come to me. I could attract lightning! My parents, dream killers that they are, were less than keen to provide me with a key and a kite so I had to work out my own plan. Metal attracts lightning so the more metal you have, the more likely you are to get yourself killed. So, get as much as possible. Lots and lots of nails hammered into a block of wood and stuck out in the rain? Rust. An old pineapple tin cut down the sides and opened up to look like a receiving dish then nailed to a block of wood? More rust. What's a boy got to do? Trees could do it all by themselves with no metal. I worked and believed my little heart out and not so much as a tingling feeling on the end of my tongue.

I was lied to. Were you?

Getting all medieval on my ....

I was highly distressed recently to realise that The Australian Bureau of Statistics has put me into the middle-aged cohort, Once you pass 40, that's officially "it", you've summitted. All that's left for you now is to make it safely back to base camp and write your memoirs in the hope that these will pay for it all.

Even more distressing and disappointing is just how much sympathy I haven't gotten from my nearest and (now formerly) dearest. My loud denunciations of this egregious mistake of categorisation are met not with rousing cries and exhorations to man the picket lines but with slight smiles, a shake of the head and softly spoken treachery in the form of statements like, "Well you are, dear". It's as if they are keen for my demise to begin. Well, I warn you all now, there's not that much there to inherit just yet so don't wish me gone too quickly.

And so it seems that I am now medieval. Not that I'm all that happy about it.

Firstly, the middle ages were characterised by the feudal system with older men at the top in positions of seniority and respect with all sorts of privileges including the droit de signeur. Tragically I find myself, at 41,  sans castle, sans vassals and with my wife keeping a close eye on any exercising of droits that might be in contemplation. Given some of the conversations I heard at the shopping centre this morning, however, I appear to be well supplied in the way of fools.

(How on Earth can you turn a metal tin, designed to store one's dishwasher tablets, humorously shaped as a dishwasher, into a ten minute conversation?)

I don't like the idea of middle age. I don't look at myself in the mirror all that much - probably because the answer to the question I might ask said mirror would almost certainly be "Well it sure ain't you, pal" but I don't think I look old enough to be middle-aged just yet.

Middle age always reminds me of the couple in the Meaning of Life

Struggling to find anything interesting enough any more to warrant talking about. And I just can't see myself in that hat.

It's a time of life when sexual attractiveness has faded to a pleasant reminiscence and that's not good. Middle aged people are probably sexually attractive to one another, but that's hardly the point. As any man will tell you, it's not a question of actually wanting to have an affair, it's just the knowledge that you'd be at the starting line with other contenders in the Golden Chase for 25 year olds, having blitzed through in the qualifying rounds.

It's also the time of life your parents were at in the earliest real memories you have of them. You were ten or twelve and they were 40 or thereabouts. And they were always old. Parents were always old and uncool and finding their joy in coffee and chat, not sunny beach and silly buggers. I don't want to think of myself as having reached the stage where my children will start at loving contempt and slowly graduate to doting pity and finally sympathetic visits and loud inquiries as to whether I've remembered to take my pills today.

There is also that first hint of gathering darkness, just out there on the horizon. I can see the distant flashes of lightning and know that the storm approacheth. Unlike the me of my adolescent delusions, this me will not live forever, hiding out in society and changing my name every eighty years so that people don't get all hysterical and burn me for a warlock. I will die at some point. This brilliant coruscation that is consciousness will one day be gone and I have no evidence at all that my being will continue beyond that point. I am not afraid but I'm not happy about it.

So I've decided that my own person medieval period will be short. Enter my personal Leonardo and my own Renaissance. Quite how that's going to work in reality, I don't know but I'll keep you posted.

Developments in the ultimate reality show

The public outcry has been predictably muted following the eviction of Zoroaster from The Deity following weeks of speculation that the ancient Persian god had been out of the A-league for too long to remain competitive. Something of a wildcard from the beginning, Zara - as he'd become known on social media - was never really expected to make the final cut but will probably not disappear into oblivion quite yet as the chat shows and gossip mags will want to listen to his commandments for a few weeks at least.

Zara joins a list of gods that have made the walk of shame from Nirvana - the show's glamorous set at MovieWorld on the Gold Coast - and out of contention to be the god of the world.

The Aztec's were the first to go when Huitzilopochtli got only four nominations in the first round of public voting. Pundits speculated that this was mostly because his name was impossible to SMS or pronounce for the viewers that call the 1900 number.

Zuul went in controversial circumstances following accusations that she wasn't a real god at all but just something made up for the Ghostbusters movies. The producers were rumoured to be upset by the loss because a little 1980's sex appeal was a good thing for the ratings and did something to offset the oversupply of men in beards and robes.

 As for Venkmann, he didn't even make it past the auditions after forgetting the famous advice that "When someone asks you if you are a god, you say YES!"

Thor looks unlikely to continue much longer either. The Norse thunder god is just not competitive in the various styles of godding that are required of the contestants. He started strongly with a great audition calling down the wrath of the weather and striking fear and awe into the hearts of the peasants. He seemed to be likely to go far after he incinerated Simon Cowell for being excessively facetious and annoying.  Since then, though, Thor has struggled to demonstrate versatility, unable to change water into wine, cure lepers, or move mountains as required.

The favourites in the competition, Jesus and Mohammed, continue to perform strongly but there are whispers on social media that Mohammed's support is waning as people are reminded that he never claimed to be a god at all - merely the prophet of the god. This is the same god that Jesus and Yahweh - the leading Jewish contender following the loss of Baal in the early days of the contest - claim to be and questions are being asked as to whether the big M has the hubris to succeed under pressure.

Zeus is the surprise challenger. The old man turns out to have versatility that no-one expected. When asked to show diversity in the Manifestation round, Jesus only managed tongues of fire. Yahweh looked to have taken the round with a pillar of fire and the same of smoke but Zeus came out of left field and blitzed the public with a goose and a golden shower. Always trust experience.

We are all looking forward to October when one deity will be chosen as god of all the world and will then bring an end to religious disputes for all time - thanks to the power of reality television.




 

I'm fairly sure that's bollocks

North Queensland is a beautiful place to live - except for the bollocks. Azure ocean, balmy climate, swaying palm trees etc make breakfast at my local cafe like some kind of dream. Then there are the bollocks.

For some reason, someone thought "tow ball" = "balls" (I think Americans call a "tow ball"  a "hitch" - where you attach your trailer to the car). And then they developed the large scrotum - in a range of designer colours including gold and silver - that you can hang from your tow ball to announce to the world how much class you have. Perhaps also to compensate for something?

I am disappointed in our local feminists though. Women drive utes these days and hunt pigs. Where are the large dangling ovaries on their 4WDs? Come on ladies, you're letting the sisterhood down.

But these are not the only kind of bollocks that are currently disturbing me - although they are taking up a large amount of my disturbation quotient.

A recent dispute over lack of prior notification of the release of a new version popular kitchen appliance (and I dare you to come up with a more first-world problem) was defended by the company in question by saying that the release was done "in accordance with global brand compliance".

What?

I'll take the adjectives out of that sentence and see if it gets better.

"in accordance with compliance"

Nope. I'm fairly sure the whole thing is bollocks. It means nothing at all. Sounds good, very official, so much like they're following all the rules but all they've actually said is that they are "compliant". With what they are compliant remains a mystery to the aggrieved consumer, but they can take some comfort, one hopes, in the general sense of complicity that pervades the communication.

While still in the kitchen, I am reassured that the fat soaked oats masquerading as health food and labelled as muesli bars are good for my kids by a cattle-style brand on the front of the box reading "lunchbox friendly".

I'm fairly sure that's also bollocks.

The rot probably set in when we started accepting the idea of "environmentally friendly". That doesn't mean anything either. "Friendly" is an adjective so "environmentally" must be an adverb - expanding on the way in which I am friendly. I can be, for example, genuinely friendly, superficially friendly, inappropriately friendly etc. In those cases I am friendly in a genuine way, a superficial way or an inappropriate way. How can I be friendly in an environmental way? Send only recycled birthday cards? Only develop relationships with people that drive small cars and have dreadlocks?

So we try another possible meaning - I am friendly with the environment. It might mean that I have to start describing my relationships in odd ways if I am to be consistent, though - I am Andrewly Friendly or Janinely Friendly. That aside, I think that the idea of developing a mutually supportive and affectionate relationship with a complex, planet-wide ecosystem is a mind-bending mismatching of concepts - like being emotionally blackmailed by Pythagoras' Theorem.

Or, it could be that I, or the product, do good things for the environment - such as I might do for my friends - lend them the wheelbarrow, help them with some paving, babysit the kids, that kind of thing. Gaia has my number - I'm waiting for the call.

None of which helps me with the muesli bars, though. They are not friendly in a moulded pink plastic kind of way, they haven't developed a reciprocal emotional attachment to the Tupperware and they aren't doing it any favours.

Nope. "Lunchbox Friendly" is just what it seems - a bit, gold coloured set of meaningless bollocks.

Reverse advertising

It's wonderful to see the marketing industry innovating even in these tough times for the retail sector. Their most recent creation - evidence that liquid lunches are not always a good idea - is reverse advertising;  advertising that makes you want to actively go out and avoid buying the product.

The seeds of reverse advertising were sown way back in the days of analogue television and dial up internet by cutting edge practitioners like K-Tel and and Demtel - whose trademark set of free steak knives were early indicators of the genius that was to follow.  Acres of warehouse space were filled with unsellable products and insolvency trustees and administrators kept in profitable employment by the work of these early pioneers; annoying people so much that they wouldn't buy the product at gunpoint.

The development of broadband internet and the Beer Humour school of advertising took these entrepreneurs by surprise and the development of reverse advertising was put on hold for a decade while people actually made money through attracting people with advertising.

However, this school of thought was doomed to failure as soon as the clients for these companies realised that the joke was only going to be funny a dozen or so times and then they were going to have to make another expensive ad.

At the same time, the noise in the advertising market rose to such a pitch as to drown out all other ways of selling a product. In this new jungle, only the Howler Monkeys survived and the early work in Reverse Advertising was re-discovered by a new generation of young Turks and pitched to a new batch of presumably insane clients.

And a fertile environment they found for their wares. The advent of in-app advertising was heaven sent for the Reversers and they wasted no time in filling up the gaming experience of every person on the planet with dull ads repeated every time the player had another go at getting three stars on an Angry Birds level.

Keeping up with technology, the Reversers have gotten into the ear of Google and introduced the unskippable 15 second ad on YouTube. There is no way known that a person, forced to watch 15 seconds of ever to be repeated new car runout deals, is going to run out and do anything other than set fire to the dealership. Whole movements have sprung up under the banner of 5SS (Five Seconds then Skip) to help consumers boycott products who unethically take up time advertising during pirated movie content. The Reversers are rejoicing because they have finally found a way to get people talking about their clients' products.

While try-hard copy-cats are providing cut-price, over-hyphenated versions of the same idea by selling mass emailing and SMS campaigns to clients at the holes-in-my-socks end of the market, the diamond standard PR firms  have successfully re-engineered whole business models around Reverse Advertising. Whereas in the days of Demtel, dodgy hair straighteners, vacuum cleaners, exercise products and nose trimmers were only available if you called in the next thirty minutes, these days purveyors of such tripe not only pay to annoy you to death but also pay to name the leading retailers at whose emporia you can studiously avoid purchasing their products. It's award winning marketing genius at its best.

In a time when the Australian economy is likely to drop down the sinkhole of the mining industry at any moment, it's wonderful to see that our diggers are ever ready to succeed against impossible odds and make good money from annoying the crap out of people.

Notes:

The two beer ads mentioned above are both for Carlton Draught and are

Canoes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptGf4sGv2EE

Big Ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6uJlI-t14

"Diggers" is an Australian term for soldiers.

Why are you talking?

Is it a common phenomenon to wonder why people are talking?

I learned something about communication a while ago and I seem to recall the concept involving exchange of information.  Listening to many of the conversations around me, I think I missed a tutorial.

Conversation style 1 involves discussing a common experience;  the weather is a perennial favourite. "It's a bit cold today!" This is self-evidently true. Anyone whose nervous system is in a fair state is repair will have experienced the phenomenon.  When two people are both rubbing their hands together in front if an open fire and are having to use a hair drier to melt the ice off their eyebrows, one will inevitably say to the other "It's a bit cold today!" What information is being imparted that adds to the knowledge of the impartee?

Conversation style 2 is about things a bit more remote from either of the speakers.  Say there's a news story about a car crash in which a family has been killed.  Now none of the interlocutors know any of the victims; indeed, the accident could have occurred in another state but it's still apparently worth exchanging some words over.  The chat inevitably opens with "Did you see ..." which seems to establish a shared baseline of knowledge.  Once this is done,  step two seems to involve sharing an emotional response. "That's terrible", "I feel so sorry for [insert surviving family members here]". This again is bewildering. Unless you're a card-carrying dues-paid psychopath,  the untimely death of another human being, particularly a child, will elicit at least a glimmer of empathy.  What is gained by vocalising the common emotional response?  Are we just checking in on the sanity of each other by making sure that we are still reacting appropriately? Alternatively,  do we have some kind of need for a herd response?

Conversation style 2a is even more bizarre. It's style 2 but the subjects of our sympathy aren't even real. I am completely baffled by the need to have emotional responses to soap operas, let alone take valuable time out of the day to share them.  These people are grown adults.  They do realise that Ted just got a better contract on another show, don't they?  He didn't actually die.

Is anyone the wiser for these exchanges?

My working hypothesis so far is that conversation is not about the exchange of information,  it's a way to make sure that our thoughts and feelings are sufficiently typical and average to be socially acceptable.

Conversation style 3 seems to confirm this theory. This is most commonly known as the "What about him? Do you think he's cute?" conversation.  Once married,  it becomes the "I'm thinking of buying a Jeep" exchange.  This is the ploy whereby we try to avoid having an unpopular opinion by stating our views as a question and gauging the response.  See who salutes, as it were. It's a great tactic if we're feeling particularly cowardly and unwilling to risk the judgement of others.

The final and rarest type of conversation is number 4; the kind in which real information is actually exchanged - and it's not about work. Facts and informed opinions are stated and responded to in kind. I've come across one or two of these in the wild - beyond the confines of the university zoos - but they are exceedingly rare.

Perhaps I might start a little breeding program.